I recommend using external hard drives for backup. A 200GB drive can be purchased for about $200.00. This is by far cheaper than tape. By using a rotation of multiple external hard drives you get a form of backup that is much faster than tape and can be taken off-site. The backups can be checked by just browsing drive, similar to browsing your C: drive.

External hard drives work with most backup software, and some drives even come with their own. Switching from a tape based system to a drive based system normally requires very little modification to your current system.

In summary, external drives are faster, easier to verify, and much cheaper than tape. When it comes time to upgrade your schools data backup system do a comparison between tape and external hard drives. I think you will see that unless tape drive manufacturers makes some big changes they are quickly on their way to becoming obsolete in school market.

• Range Validation control: Prompts message to user, if data entered in input field is not within range of values specified by Maximum and Minimum properties of validation control.

• Comparison Validation control: Allows user to compare two values and check for comparisons such as equality, greater-than, less-than etc. In addition you can check whether data entered in input field is of data type as specified by you.

• RegularExpression Validation control: Allows you to validate if format of a certain input field is correct or not. You can check validation of commonly performed formats such as social security numbers, e-mail addresses, telephone numbers, and postal code.

• Custom Validation control: Allows you to define your own condition for validating data in input fields. Two validation functions can be performed using Custom Validation control: first on server-side and second on client-side. These functions contain logic defined by you to validate input fields. These functions returns True value and False value, if condition you specified is correct or not respectively.

If control’s value does not validate to what you have specified in validation control tag, web form displays an error message. Moreover, you can customize format of error message by using control properties such as BackColor, BorderStyle, and BorderWidth. In addition, you can use Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) to format an error message.

To access online version of above article, please go to http://www.dotnet-guide.com/validation.html